I wonder if Cats really deserved the fait it wrought. You have to wonder if it was universally seen to be terrible, or if a couple of early opinions led a wave of negative opinions. Tough to really know.
The original musical was just as weird and creepy and lacking in any sort of coherent plot. But that was a big part of its appeal.
The musical came out at a time when you couldn't tweet to the world about how you were damaged for life by seeing something you deemed creepy, and then watch everyone else pile on. It was also before the concept of "furries" was well known, and I guess now everyone wants to make sure everyone knows they aren't into that sort of thing.
British Pantomime is a funny thing. When it's done in the right context it's high art.
I'm sure when it premiered on the West End in 1981 the audience was in on the joke.
Monty Python had a grand time with all their Panto references. This skit could be seen as a predictor of Furry culture (even if that wasn't the intent at the time).
Lastly, this is my favorite Panto reference. In the context of the movie it's heartbreaking. Mel Brooks gave the director of Eraserhead control over this movie, and we got this. David Lynch was American but he clearly "got" was Panto was all about.
I'm not suggesting they were going for furry, I'm just suggesting a lot of people look at the Cats movie now and make that connection (specifically the sexualization of non-human mammals).
I really hate the confusion between whether the cats’ fur is part of their bodies or not. Like some of them seem to wear huge fur coats with obvious collars/lapels but it’s also part of their body, and in this one she unzips her... body and then there’s more underneath? When it’s really actors in costumes on stage that makes sense but that clip makes me feel queasy...
Your comment reminds me how in the Sheckley's short story "The Demons" Neelsebub was confused when human take off his coat.
I think that these scene actually removes confusion as it clearly establishes that they definitely can wear fur coats over their natural fur. I don't get how it's different from humans, we also have skin-colored clothes.
It is not specifically weird, but it seems like public someway started to associate anthropomorphic animals with sexual fetishes, so when they see cat eating cockroach in that scene for example they think about vore fetish and so on.
A creature with a human face is casually eating another creature with a human face, whole. That's weird and a description of "vore" is fair even if you're absolutely sure there's nothing sexual going on.
However, were the original characters in the Cats play actually humanoid cats? Or were they just humans dressing up as cats and the audience was meant to suspend disbelief that what they were looking at were just regular cats?
I ask because obviously a play can't get "live talking cats" without human actors but a movie can easily do so with CG.
Why did they decide to go with humanoid cats instead of regular cats with voice actors? Was it just to match the aesthetic of the play? Or does the plot actually involve the cats being canonicaly humanoid?
The stage costumes (look up 'Cats musical' on Google Images) are basically decorated bodysuits plus facepaint and wigs. They have a lot of subtle touches to keep them intentionally registering as 'acrobatic costume' without tripping uncanny valley issues, like how almost all of them include obvious belts (for the 'tails') and a clear division between body and neck/face even if the facepaint is the same color as the bodysuit being worn.
The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical performance of Shakespeare's play.
The musical is based on an existing work, a correction of amusing poems about actual cats by T S Eliot.
Probably the movie just shouldn't exist. An animated movie of the poems using some famous songs from the musical could have worked for example, but that's not what this is.
> The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical performance of Shakespeare's play.
They were asking what specifically the costumes represent. They weren't confused about the concept of costumes in a play.
The cats are anthropomorphized somewhat, or they wouldn't be having proper conversations with each other. This already requires suspension of disbelief, accepting that it's a fantasy world. The question is how far that anthropomorphization goes, in the internal logic/canon of the play.
Even putting that aside, it's more the kind of thing you'd expect in an art film than something intended for general audiences, even assuming the film overall is good (or good at doing whatever it's trying to do) which does not seem to be a safe assumption in this case.
I'm hoping that is an early CGI test render and not the final product that people paid to see. Otherwise I have trouble working out where the reported massive CG budget went.
Sure but what was being suggested was a bandwagon effect where a few early reviews are bad and it influences the reviews afterwards. Since the major reviews were all published on the same day that doesn't seem particularly likely.
I've only seen clips of the movie, but those don't look very promising IMO. I read that this had a $95 million production budget, I can't fathom what they spent it on when looking at the end result.
Beyond that I'm quite a bit sceptical of choosing Cats for a movie adaption at all. It's nowhere near 'Phantom of the Opera' in terms of popularity, and the last (2004) movie of that musical didn't do particularly well at the box office.
It could have turned out perfectly fine if they just used cats for the characters. Like, CGI cats that look like actual members of felis catus, instead of humans who accidentally drank a polyjuice potion with cat hair in it.
Alas, Tom Hooper has a habit of retaining stage musical-like elements when he makes movies based on stage musicals. He shot many scenes in Les Miserables in a way that felt more like a stage production than a cinematic one; the difference is stark if you compare it with, say, The Greatest Showman -- which is a movie about a stage production! But Les Miz wasn't too bad, it was just a bit awkward. This time it seems Hooper has gone one step too far, though.
